Dinosaur Dreaming dig season opens

Lisa works in the Public Programs Department at Melbourne Museum but also volunteers in the Palaeontology Department and has been on several fossil digs.

Last weekend hailed the beginning of the annual Dinosaur Dreaming dig season at Inverloch in Victoria. The crew will spend the next three weeks searching for the fossils of animals including dinosaurs, mammals, turtles, freshwater plesiosaurs, fish and pterosaurs that lived on and around the floodplain and in the forests that existed in the area 120 million years ago.

We can only access the dig site while the tide is out far enough to expose the shore platform, and before we can start hunting for fossils we need to prepare the site. First we remove the sand with shovels, which is often a bit of a smelly job due to the bits of rotting seaweed that have washed into the hole (the name we give to the part of the site which is being worked at any given time) with the tide.

Left: The crew removes sand, boulders and seaweed from on top of the rock layers. Right: John Wilkins and Dean Wright remove one of many large boulders from the dig site using a boulder extraction contraption John invented and built for us.Image: Lisa NinkSource: Museum Victoria

Next we use large chisels, crowbars and large drills to remove the overlying layer of sandstone. Once we have access to the fossil layer we can begin searching.

Some of the crew use large chisels and sledgehammers to remove large chunks of the fossil layer and the rest of the crew sit further up on the shore breaking these large rocks into walnut sized pieces in search of fossils.

Left: Travis Park uses a sledgehammer and chisel to remove a large chunk of fossil-bearing rock. Right: Gerry Kool uses a much smaller hammer and chisel to break down chunks of rock in search of fossils.Image: Lisa NinkSource: Museum Victoria

While the main aim of the dig is to find fossils, there is much more we can learn about the site. Dean Wright, a surveyor, and Doris Seegats-Villiers, a PhD candidate at Monash University, used a Leica Total Station to collect data which will be used to map geological features such as the different rock layers and fault lines. Dean plans to overlay this data onto a 3D map of the site he made last year and this information will assist scientists to better understand the geology of the site.

Dean Wright and Doris Seegats-Villiers taking data points which Dean will use to create a geologic map of the Flatrocks site.Image: Lisa NinkSource: Museum Victoria

Some of the interesting bones we have found so far this season:

Left: A cross-section through a dinosaur limb bone. Right: A cross-section through a dinosaur toe bone.Image: Lisa NinkSource: Museum Victoria